


Prompt: Collide

by chels0792



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Canon Related, Friendship, Implied Sexual Content, Quick Read, Romance, fluff?, non-canon, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 04:30:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15089027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chels0792/pseuds/chels0792
Summary: I've been challenged to post a work that is a) less than one thousand words and b) has not been edited for longer than a week. I worked this up today and it's at 997 words, so I win.Collide is a one-word prompt (my shortest yet- I'm not a short story person). There are a lot of themes from the book A Hero of Our Time.Does anyone else get nervous about posting less-edited works? I'm sweating bullets. Please enjoy!





	Prompt: Collide

 

                He hadn’t meant to spend the morning lost in thought.

                Alfred scrubbed the bottom of his sock against the rug, wrapped his fingers in his belt loops, sipped the coffee in his mug. Manhattan below busied itself with the lunch rush and with finding relief from the unrelenting heat of August: patrons huddled beneath shaded awnings and inside the cool relief of coffee shops and bakeries along the baking sidewalk. Refrigerated flower carts defended their wares. Mothers guarded their children from the sun’s unrelenting rays. Men threw their arms around one another and joked about the heat. Flags waved merrily from every corner, both familiar and unfamiliar, a melody of crimson and gold and black and stars that caught the light.

                He made a wry expression at his reflection in the window, distorted by dancing heatwaves. He had so much work to do. He had no time to sit and the table and stare out the window over his pancakes—which, unfortunately, had melted into a soggy, syrupy mess while he had been lost in reverie. A perfectly fine breakfast ruined. Mattie would have his head.

                It wasn’t his fault. He was sleepy and hungry and low on caffeine when he caught the distinct scent of spiced cigarettes that still lingered in the room. He had caught cloves and had been shocked by the wave that crashed over him: longing filled his stomach, and his breakfast lost its appeal. He’d remembered cooling ashes in the crystal tray on the salon table. The ashes remained, and the single abandoned filter lay cold on the glass where it had fallen during the night.   

                Russia hadn’t been gone longer than six hours—if even that long—not long enough for his Sobranie to fade from the air, but Alfred missed him as intensely as if they hadn’t met in years. The urge to call—ridiculous, even for him—set his phone in his palm, and Alfred began to dial before he realized he’d reached for his phone at all.

                His cell lay quarantined at the far end of the table and out of his reach. Russia was busy too.

                Ivan’s flight departure time was unreasonable. Alfred lied. He twisted two fingers in the pocket of his jacket and assured Ivan with confidence that no taxi service in Manhattan operated past midnight.

                Ivan, who knew Alfred too well, agreed wholeheartedly. He accepted the invitation to dessert and coffee and asked no more questions. The gathered nations watched them leave with pinched expressions. No one spoke. Alfred thought Artie’s pallid expression looked like old parchment.

                His suitcase spent the evening at Alfred’s front door. Ivan spent the evening in the salon. They shared a long, charged, ethical conversation over cheesecake. An argument about privacy carried them through several bottles of wine. When Ivan loosened his tie, Alfred offered his lighter across the low glass table. Smoke lilted to the ceiling, and Alfred made an anecdote to their debate on federal holidays.

                The moon could only manage a sliver of light. Darkness met them on the edge of the stairwell, followed them into the bedroom that Ivan had learned well. Darkness covered discarded ties and belts and button-downs. Darkness clung to the sheets wrapped around their embrace, to the side of the mattress, to the clutch of Alfred’s fingers in the blanket. Night yawned onward without them.

                Alfred woke to sleepy darkness and the sound of Russia’s zipper, the clink of his belt. Warm and heavy—so very satisfied—Alfred watched from his pillow as Ivan gathered his things to leave: the slope of wide stone shoulders, white fingers as light as the mist that tip-toed landside from the Black Sea, that ageless Mona Lisa smile.

In a voice muted by sleep, he wished Ivan a safe journey home where his sisters were waiting. Ivan bent over the mattress to kiss him good morning, then again to kiss him good night. Then he kissed Alfred goodbye, and was gone.   

                Alfred slept soundly through the night and late into the morning. He made the bed to disguise the mussed sheets where Russia had curled on his side to hold him. He pushed from his mind the comfort of Ivan’s steady embrace and his unique violet stare. Ivan would always look right through him.

                Glass and cardboard fell into a bag. Black plastic obscured his view. Alfred fluffed the sofa and tried not to think about long black slacks crossed at the knee and the quirk of Ivan’s eyebrow before he flicked ash from his cigarette and leaned over the table to mock him.

                He poured himself a cup of piping hot coffee and sipped while steam warmed his nose. The kiss of heated porcelain cleansed his mind of cool lips, a cold tongue, soft teeth.

                But when he sat at the table, crystal glitters over the salon floor and spiced smoke on the air dragged him back to the thrill of deliberation—a trait of their relationship unchanged by recent events—and the comfort of an old friend. He remembered long white fingers and a cigarette left to die as darkness mistakenly took them into a promise of anonymity that had once cloaked them in its protection, and rose to stare at the flags outside the windows.

                Ivan was thirty thousand feet above Berlin, and Alfred stood miles above Manhattan with his stomach empty enough to feel a magnetic pull to the East, like tectonic plates inching closer to meeting or like the Earth trapped in orbit around the Sun. He felt a distinct and unfamiliar sense of displacement, of things that were not as God intended them to be.

                The intensity of his longing was concerning. When he called to ask about the European conference, he would ask Ivan if he felt the same.

                Below him, through the glass, a woman in a black skirt cracked open a copy of _A Hero of Our Time_.

                Why did he crave a cigarette?   

 


End file.
